Posts categorized "Musings"

October 26, 2009

Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.

On Slate's DoubleX website, a columnist concluded from the study that "the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women's complaints disguised as manifestos... and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act -- in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs." Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it, more soberly: "[T]he feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach... [S]elf-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness."

But it's a little too soon to blame Gloria Steinem for our dependence on SSRIs. For all the high-level head-scratching induced by the Stevenson and Wolfers study, hardly anyone has pointed out (1) that there are some issues with happiness studies in general, (2) that there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular, or (3) that, even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone's mood.

For starters, happiness is an inherently slippery thing to measure or define. Philosophers have debated what it is for centuries, and even if we were to define it simply as a greater frequency of positive feelings than negative ones, when we ask people if they are happy, we are asking them to arrive at some sort of average over many moods and moments. Maybe I was upset earlier in the day after I opened the bills, but then was cheered up by a call from a friend, so what am I really?

In one well-known psychological experiment, subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire on life satisfaction, but only after they had performed the apparently irrelevant task of photocopying a sheet of paper for the experimenter. For a randomly chosen half of the subjects, a dime had been left for them to find on the copy machine. As two economists summarize the results: "Reported satisfaction with life was raised substantially by the discovery of the coin on the copy machine -- clearly not an income effect."

As for the particular happiness study under discussion, the red flags start popping up as soon as you look at the data. Not to be anti-intellectual about it, but the raw data on how men and women respond to the survey reveal no discernible trend to the naked eyeball. Only by performing an occult statistical manipulation called "ordered probit estimates," do the authors manage to tease out any trend at all, and it is a tiny one: "Women were one percentage point less likely than men to say they were not too happy at the beginning of the sample [1972]; by 2006 women were one percentage more likely to report being in this category." Differences of that magnitude would be stunning if you were measuring, for example, the speed of light under different physical circumstances, but when the subject is as elusive as happiness -- well, we are not talking about paradigm-shifting results.

Furthermore, the idea that women have been sliding toward despair is contradicted by the one objective measure of unhappiness the authors offer: suicide rates. Happiness is, of course, a subjective state, but suicide is a cold, hard fact, and the suicide rate has been the gold standard of misery since sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote the book on it in 1897. As Stevenson and Wolfers report -- somewhat sheepishly, we must imagine -- "contrary to the subjective well-being trends we document, female suicide rates have been falling, even as male suicide rates have remained roughly constant through most of our sample [1972-2006]." Women may get the blues; men are more likely to get a bullet through the temple.

Another distracting little data point that no one, including the authors, seems to have much to say about is that, while "women" have been getting marginally sadder, black women have been getting happier and happier. To quote the authors: "...happiness has trended quite strongly upward for both female and male African Americans... Indeed, the point estimates suggest that well-being may have risen more strongly for black women than for black men." The study should more accurately be titled "The Paradox of Declining White Female Happiness," only that might have suggested that the problem could be cured with melanin and Restylane.

But let's assume the study is sound and that (white) women have become less happy relative to men since 1972. Does that mean that feminism ruined their lives?

October 07, 2009

From Dan Markel on PrawfsBlawg: I've received a few requests by aspiring prawfs asking for a thread that's not related to the AALS meat market and the timing of callbacks, etc. This can be a thread in which candidates could ask questions about the conference, interviews, clothing protocol, questions to ask/not to ask, etc. and professors or previous attendees of the market could respond with feedback. In general, it'll just be a place where candidates could go to get their random questions answered.

September 07, 2009

Some people suspect that a multitasking lifestyle has changed how they think, leaving them easily distracted and unable to concentrate even when separated from computers and phones. Their uneasiness may be justified.

In several benchmark tests of focus, college students who routinely juggle many flows of information, bouncing from e-mail to web text to video to chat to phone calls, fared significantly worse than their low-multitasking peers.

Other studies have focused on multitasking’s immediate effects — children doing worse on homework while watching television, office workers being more productive when not checking email every five minutes.

“We wanted to ask a different question,” said Clifford Nass, a Stanford University cognitive scientist. “What happens to people who multitasking all the time?”

In a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nass and Stanford psychologists Anthony Wagner and Eyal Ophir surveyed 262 students on their media consumption habits. The 19 students who multitasked the most and 22 who multitasked least then took two computer-based tests, each completed while concentrating only on the task at hand.

First, they had to remember the briefly glimpsed orientations of red rectangles surrounded by different numbers of blue rectangles. In the second task, they were asked to categorize a random string of words, and then to do it again without categorizing words that were preceded by a beep.

In a third test, a different group of 30 high- and low-multitaskers were asked to identify target letters on a screen. As the test was repeated, they had to remember whether letters had also been targeted in earlier trials.

In every test, students who spent less time simultaneously reading e-mail, surfing the web, talking on the phone and watching TV performed best.

“These are all very standard tasks in psychology,” said Nass. “In the first, there’s lots of evidence that if people do poorly, they have trouble ignoring irrelevant information. For the second task, there are many demonstrations that this is a good reflection of people’s ability to organize things in their working memory. The third task shows how fast and readily people switch from doing one thing to another.”

As for what caused the differences — whether people with a predisposition to multitask happen to be mentally disorganized, or if multitasking feeds the condition — “that’s the million dollar question, and we don’t have a million dollar answer,” said Nass.

Wagner next plans to use brain imaging to study the neurology of multitasking, while Ness wants to look at the development of multitasking habits in children.

“The causality question is enormous here,” he said. “There’s a lot of social pressure to multitask. You’re getting tweets, e-mails, IMs from multiple people at once, and the web offers unbelievable opportunities for text and video. It may be thrust upon you.”

Citation: “Cognitive control in media multitaskers.” By Eyal Ophira, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106 No. 33, August 25, 2009.

July 28, 2009

Here's a challenge to help fill those remaining hours of summer, if you're looking for ways to procrastinate: write a six word story. It has to be a real story, not just a list of words. You know, like Hemingway's, "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Here are some that emerged from the second Applied Legal Storytelling Conference (Once Upon a Legal Story, Chapter 2 -- more on that in a subsequent post): "Chris kissed Shawn, now walks funny" (I changed the names to protect confidentiality, and to create gender ambiguity); "Permission to teach freely granted here;" "She's coming home tomorrow! Anticipation mounts;" and (a sequel to the preceding?) "Hair, skin, lips, eyes -- hers? Mine?"

And my favorite for this time of year: "Time's a-wasting: get to work!" -- but to make it really six words, I guess it should be: "Time is wasting: get to work." Either way . . . .

July 27, 2009

A common refrain among opponents of same-sex marriage is the importance of defending “the family.” They feel that the institution of the family, as they conceive it, will be undermined if same-sex marriages are recognized. This is a peculiar kind of argument, and it traps them in a paradox that has a remarkable historical precedent.In the Civil War, the Southerners frequently declared that they were fighting for liberty and self-government. The title of James McPherson’s history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom, capitalizes on the fact that, as McPherson writes, “[b]oth sides . . . professed to be fighting for freedom.” Jefferson Davis declared in 1863 that the South was “forced to take up arms to vindicate the political rights, the freedom, equality, and State sovereignty which were the heritage purchased by the blood of our revolutionary sires.” But the freedom that Davis was fighting for depended, of course, on the enslavement of others. The southern commissioners to Britain reported home that “the public mind here is entirely opposed to the Government of the Confederate States of America on the question of slavery. . . . The sincerity and universality of this feeling embarrass the government in dealing with the question of our recognition.”

Opponents of same-sex marriage today face a similar embarrassment. They are eager to protect their distinctive conception of family. But that conception depends on marginalizing the families of others and denying them legal recognition. This inevitably produces atrocities in which dying hospital patients are kept separated from their partners and children.Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine contains yet another horror story, of moronic state officials mindlessly trying to sever ties between gay parents and children. As these stories become better known, the invocation of “family” as a reason to beat up on gay people will seem as weird as the invocation of “freedom” did as a defense of the Confederacy.

June 25, 2009

Above the Law Ed. note: Welcome to the latest installment of "Notes from the Breadline," a column by a laid-off lawyer in New York. Prior columns are collected here. You can reach Roxana St. Thomas by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook.

We've all heard the statistics about attorney layoffs, unemployment, and the sad state of the economy. But do the hard numbers tell the full story of life in the breadline? Inspired by the Harper's Index, today I offer you the Notes from the Breadline Index.

Months in the breadline: 6

Estimated number of jobs applied for: 266

Estimated number of responses received to job inquiries: 23

Follow-up phone calls returned: 2

Soup recipes developed: 4

Meals consisting primarily of soup: 87

Approximate hours spent online trolling for potential jobs: 745

Average number of times, per day, email inbox checked for responses to job inquiries: 28

Percentage of times inbox check followed by fleeting thought that email has stopped working: 8

Number of evil cats currently freeloading off meager household income: 2

Number of times I have seriously considered the employability of cats: 3

June 24, 2009

At her Chicago office, Kelly Huang connects with a friend in New York via Facebook. AP

If you're a boss, what do you do about employees who love to tweet, text and social network throughout the day? It's a question companies are grappling with as the generation gap threatens to create a communications divide.

Eric Pro, a 19-year-old electrical engineer at Aquas Inc. in Bethesda, Md., takes a few seconds out from his workday to send a quick text message on his T-Mobile Sidekick. He says he's in trouble with his girlfriend and he's trying to smooth things out.

While Pro may be worried about how things stand with his love interest, recent studies show real tensions are rising between Gen Y, or 20-something employees; Gen X, or 30-something workers; and their older, less tech-savvy, baby boomer bosses.

Culture Clash

"I'm old-school, but I am willing to learn," says 56-year-old Carmen Larsen, the president of Aquas, an engineering and IT company. Larsen says she typically reaches for a phone before a keyboard. But her daughters, who work with her, help with the learning curve.

"People go out of the office to take a cigarette break for 10 minutes, people take coffee breaks and people take Facebook breaks," says Emma Evans, Larsen's 19-year-old daughter. "It's kind of become built into our way of life."

In fact, 62 percent of Gen Y workers say they engage in social networking from work. That's according to LexisNexis, an online information service. The results of LexisNexis' Technology Gap Survey show vastly different attitudes about appropriate technology use among various generations in the work force. And this is creating a clash of cultures — especially during meetings.

Debate Over Multitasking

"You can have Gen Y-ers who are busy looking at their BlackBerrys. They've got their laptops flipped open, they're engaging in social networking right during the course of a meeting, and you have a boomer rolling their eyes, not understanding it," says Michael Walsh, the CEO for LexisNexis U.S. Legal Markets. "Two-thirds of boomers that were surveyed indicated that they felt that use of devices, technology — such as e-mail, social networking, the Internet, etc. — contributed to a decline in office etiquette."

Meanwhile, Gen X-ers are caught between having to manage and bridge the gap.

Walsh says the generational divide is most intense in Fortune 500 companies because senior management is typically made up of baby boomers. But it's also an issue that small companies like Aquas — with just over 30 employees ranging in age from 18 to 68 — have to contend with.

Social Networking's Reach

According to a workplace study on social networking and reputation risk by consulting giant Deloitte, nearly three-quarters of employees surveyed say they think it's easy to damage a company's reputation using social media.

Companies are cognizant of the far-reaching impact employees can have on their brand through social networking and other online activities. In April, when two Domino's pizza employees posted a video online showing one of them sticking cheese up his nose and sneezing on food, it sent shock waves through the corporate world.

Still, Deloitte's study also found that more than half of employees say their social networking is none of their employer's business.

Sharon Allen, chairman of Deloitte's board, says employers shouldn't put too many rules and restrictions into place: "We do believe as well that the ability to touch base with friends and family during the course of the day allows them to have a better mix of work and life."

Like it or not, technology is blurring the lines between work and leisure. In his book Elsewhere, U.S.A., New York University professor Dalton Conley even coined a term for it: "weisure."

May 25, 2009

President Obama wants Supreme Court justices who have empathy. What could be wrong with that, asks Dahlia Lithwick (“Once More, Without Feeling,” Slate.com): “When did the simple act of recognizing that you are not the only one in the room become confused with lawlessness, activism, and social engineering?”

It may not be that simple. Obama’s invocations of empathy combine a concern for the less advantaged with a theory of constitutional interpretation. Speaking to his choice to fill the seat soon to be vacated by Justice Souter, Obama said, “I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.” That kind of judge, Obama explained, will have empathy: “I view the quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.”

The phrase “just decisions and outcomes” seems beyond reproach (who could object to it?), but many will hear it with suspicion and say, “Just outcomes would be nice and let’s hope we have some, but what courts should deliver is legal outcomes.” You might think that “legal” and “just” go together, and sometimes they do; but in the real world “just” and “legal” can come apart. A decision is just when it reflects an overarching vision of what is owed is to each man and woman. A decision is legal when it can be said to follow from established rules, statutes, precedents.

It is possible then that a legal decision, a decision that has a source and a pedigree in the laws that have been formally set down, could offend one’s sense of justice. And, conversely, it is also possible that a decision widely regarded as substantively just — yes, that’s the way things should be — could at the same time be seen as illegal, that is, as not following from the rules and principles of settled law. This is precisely the criticism that has been made of Brown v. Board of Education (most notably by Herbert Wechsler in his influential Harvard Law Review article “Toward Neutral Principles”); yes, the result is good, the critics acknowledge, but where, they ask, is its legal — as opposed to its empathetic — basis? And on the other side it was said, and is still said, that any jurisprudence that cannot accommodate Brown v. Board is a jurisprudence we must reject.

Indeed it has been argued, by Lon Fuller in a famous debate with H.L.A. Hart (Harvard Law Review, 1958), that a jurisprudence which generates outcomes offensive to justice doesn’t deserve the name of law. It may come fully equipped with procedures, tests, distinctions and all the other marks of law, but it isn’t law because, at its heart, it isn’t good. The question Fuller and Hart debated is whether Nazi law was law. The positivist Hart said that law and morality are two distinct registers and that a system of law could be procedurally legitimate and at the same time rest on an immoral foundation. Fuller replied by distinguishing between “mere order” and “good order,” and declared that a legal system “which clothes itself with a tinsel of legal form can so far depart from . . . the inner morality of law itself that it ceases to be a legal system.”

It is into these thickets of controversy that Obama steps (as he well knows) when he elevates empathy — a fellow feeling for those who have long been on the wrong end of the stick — above “abstract legal theory,” and insists that in addition to being legally competent the judge he approves must have justice in his or her heart. This is the criterion he applied when voting against Chief Justice Roberts. “Legal process alone,” he said in explanation of that vote, “will not lead you to a rule of decision.” Another way of putting this would be to say, it’s not really law if it’s merely legal.

But is there such a thing as “merely” or purely legal? Is there such a thing as the system of law? Is law a self-contained body of thought that rests on its own bottom? Or is what we call law inevitably influenced and even structured by forces and imperatives it does not contain? To put it in a nutshell, is law autonomous? Should it be?

Law would be autonomous if its operations proceeded without reference to norms that reside elsewhere — in religion, morality, economics, social justice, etc. This would not mean that in its unfolding law never made mention of facts and concerns found in the world outside it; only that when those facts and concerns came into the legal landscape, they were recast in legal terms rather than in the terms that belonged to the enterprises from which they were borrowed.

Insanity, for example, is a concept that has a home outside the law. But when lawyers (as opposed to psychiatrists) invoke it, they turn it into something that links up with legal categories. It is defined as an inability to tell right from wrong, not a definition that would recommend itself to the medical community. The law is autonomous when it turns everything into its own stuff so that even when it incorporates concepts from elsewhere they are emptied of their empirical content and given the content the law’s internal imperatives require.

This is precisely what the critics of law’s autonomy (or of its claimed autonomy) complain about. A legal system that first formulates its own special vocabulary (consisting largely of entities no human eye has ever seen) and then shoehorns everything it encounters into that same vocabulary will never touch down on the ground, will never respond directly to the urgencies and needs of real people living real lives.

In his ferociously funny essay “Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach” (Columbia Law Review, 1935), Felix Cohen laments “the divorce of legal reasoning from questions of social fact and ethical value.” Legal concepts, he says scornfully, are “supernatural entities which do not have a verifiable existence except to the eyes of faith,” and rules of law “which refer to these legal concepts, are not descriptions of empirical social facts . . . nor yet statements of moral ideals, but are rather theorems in an independent system.”

The law, Cohen concludes, should not be a self-referring construct of “pure geometry,” but a “social process” that deals with “human activity, with cause and effect, with the past and the future.” A responsible jurist will be one who says, “This rule leads to the following results, which are socially undesirable for the following reasons.” In short, a responsible judge will have empathy.

Whereas Cohen rejects a legal system that is without social and ethical content, other critics argue that no such system is possible, and that what Cohen calls transcendental nonsense is in fact full of the sense sponsored by the powers that be. The myth of a law distinct from substantive value is used to smuggle in the values of the ruling class. “Lawyers, judges and scholars,” says Joseph Singer, “make highly controversial political choices, but use the ideology of legal reasoning to make our institutions appear natural and our rules appear neutral” (”The Player and the Cards,” Yale Law Journal, 1984). And law schools, according to Duncan Kennedy, play their part by providing “training for willing service in the hierarchies of the corporate welfare state” (“Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy,” Journal of legal Education, 1982).

This is not very far from Obama’s critique of formalism as a “cramped and narrow” way of interpreting the Constitution “in which the . . . courts essentially become the rubber stamps of the powerful.” A better way of interpreting, he believes, would be to begin with the conviction that “the courts are the refuge of the powerless who often lose in the democratic back and forth.” Therefore we need judges “who have the empathy to recognize what it’s like be a young teen-aged mom; the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, African American or gay.”

An Obama judge will not ask, “Does the ruling I’m about to make fit neatly into the universe of legal concepts?” but rather, “Is the ruling I’m about to make attentive to the needs of those who have fared badly in the legislative process because no lobbyists spoke for their interests?” Obama’s critics object that this gets things backwards. Rather than reasoning from legal principles to results, an Obama judge will begin with the result he or she desires and then figure out how to get there by what only looks like legal reasoning.

This is the answer to Dahlia Lithwick’s question, what’s wrong with empathy? It may be a fine quality to have but, say the anti-empathists, it’s not law, and if it is made law’s content, law will have lost its integrity and become an extension of politics. Obama’s champions will reply, that’s what law always has been, and with Obama’s election there is at least a chance that the politics law enacts will favor the dispossessed rather than the powerful and the affluent. No, says Walter Williams at myrtlebeachonline: “The status of a person appearing before the court should have absolutely nothing to do with the rendering of decisions.”

And so it goes in an endless round of claims, counterclaims, accusations and dire predictions. My own prediction is that we will hear it all again once Obama announces his nominee and the drama of the confirmation hearings begins. Must-see T.V.

April 29, 2009

MS. MENTOR - the Chronicle of Higher Education

Don't E-Mail Me This Way

Someone whined, someone was offended, then someone hit 'send' when they should have hit 'delete'

Question: Getting e-mail used to excite me, but now I have to
force myself to turn on the computer. I get SCREECHES (all caps) or
cryptic mumblings from students; vague or crazy memos from colleagues;
pointless administrative pronouncements that have nothing to do with
me; and rivers of inane forwardings from people who think they're my
friends. All of these people need lessons.

Answer: Many faculty members do dread e-mail messages from students. In The Chronicle's In the Classroom Forum, a thread on "'favorite' student e-mails," begun in October of 2006, now has more than 8,000 melancholy postings.

Ms. Mentor wonders if some particularly tawdry scenario inspired
this month's query to her. Someone whined, someone was offended,
someone brandished such terms as "brat" and "meanie." Then everyone hit
"send" when they should've hit "delete" — until finally, in a brief bow
toward civilized discourse, a letter was written to Ms. Mentor, seeking
rules to e-mail by.

Ms. Mentor does get well-mannered letters from students. One recent
correspondent sought "the 10 most important rules for a student to
follow in e-mailing a professor," and even concluded, "Thank you very
much." But in every era, it is fashionable to blame the youth for bad
fashions, moral degeneration, and illiteracy. Ms. Mentor reminds her
readers that tenure was invented to instruct, socialize, and tame the
barbarian hordes — and so wise elders should teach their charges not to
send e-mail messages like this one, sent to a professor at Big Football
U: "yo, prof! i in ur class but 4got class yester-day because my cat
dyed lol. did i miss anything? plmkayecok. have a nice day. chris"

Once upon a time, students in typing class learned proper business
salutations ("Dear Professor Wise"), block and indented paragraph
styles, and businesslike endings ("Yours truly, Chris Cross"). All
that, Ms. Mentor knows, is passé and fogyish, and she mentions it only
because ranting and bemoaning are salutary at the end of an academic
year.

So why isn’t there a really active clinical blog? Our traditional colleagues seem to have taken to the blog-sphere whole hog, so to speak. What happened to clinicians
as the early adopters in the world of technology? It can’t be because
we’re too busy --- we only teach 8 students after all. And we have
plenty of time to post to the listserv.. . . .

We promise to post every day until the clinical conference in Tucson. The quid pro quo
is that you out there must provide feedback -- only in the form of
supportive, reflective and empathetic comments. And if you believe
yourself to be in possession of what passes for a sense of humor in the
legal academic world, please volunteer to be a guest blogger.. . . .

April 06, 2009

So, I recently read somewhere in the blogosphere that the deadline for accepting a visiting position at another law school during the 2009-2010 school year has just passed, and so I'm wondering whether I should feel sad that one more year has come and gone without anyone asking me if I'd like to visit at their nice law school. I mean, I don't think I know anyone who hasn't visited somewhere. Most people I know have visited many places and are scheduled for visits already right through the 2013-2014 season--"yeah," they'll say, "I'm set up for a visit at Fordham in spring 2010 and Michigan for fall 2011 and am working on getting something together at the not-yet-quite-created Brown Law School for the January term 2013." It's not like I'm exactly itching to visit somewhere--I love where I teach and how do people see their "families" when they teach halfway across the country, anyway?--but still, I wonder--in the same way that I wonder, when I'm on the subway and there's an empty seat right next to me and the person standing right next to the empty seat won't just sit down, why why why doesn't the person sit down, what is wrong with me, what do I smell like anyway?--why no law schools want me to visit. How does this whole visiting thing even work? It's not like I don't answer my phone. Indeed I sometimes sit whole days staring at my phone waiting for it to ring with a visiting offer, occasionally picking it up and listening to the dial tone to see if it's still working, but nothing, and then it's another evening of coming home, hanging up my hat, and facing the inevitable question from my wife: "Did anyone ask you to visit today, dear?" she says, and I have to put my head down and say "no" and even though she always smiles politely and pats me on the head and says "that's OK, dear," I know what she's thinking, and not just because she turns to my five year old son and says, "sorry, honey, nobody asked daddy to visit again," and he cries.

I'm not one of those guys who makes a point
of just shooting the breeze while feeling the breeze. (I once belonged,
briefly, to a gym habituated by some men who thought there was nothing
better than hanging out in the locker room and discoursing earnestly on
matters various and sundry while airing it all out. By contrast, I
belong to the “dude, seriously...” school.) My economy of motion in
getting from 'exposed' to 'not exposed' is almost Taylorist. And I
don't care so much about being seen, say, tying a tie. But there's
still an interval when there's just no getting around the fact of not
really wanting to be seen.

Some of my admin colleagues have
mentioned not using the campus gym for precisely that reason. They
think it's tough to maintain an appropriate distance after being seen
in all their glory. Admittedly, there's something to be said for that.

But
that would be admitting defeat. And when you're supporting four people
on a single community college salary, the prospect of paying for a
private gym membership out of nothing more than modesty just seems a
little tough to justify.

Wise and worldly readers – have you found a tolerable way to handle the post-shower dash at the campus gym?

February 13, 2009

As Minna noted on this blog last week, the perils of law professors establishing a presence on Facebook - and "befriending" their students there - have recently been raised by contributers to both the Chronicle of Higher Education and PrawfsBlawg. The majority of the students that I am currently supervising have been on my friends list since their first few months in our year-long clinic, and for my part, I have resolved that, after this academic year, I will only accept students' friend requests after they have graduated from law school and are technically alumni.

I would be interested to hear your comments on whether you agree with this resolution. In particular, do you think there are benefits to clinical pedagogy from using Facebook, or Twitter, or one of the other electronic social-networking tools that exist and are widely utilized outside of our law school walls? With some tweaking of the security settings to deal with the issues raised in this post, a site like Facebook might provide a vibrant alternative forum for collaboration and reflection, particularly for those students for whom written reflection will always be a more welcome medium than the verbal form that we have traditionally favored. My solution for such students has been to utilize individual reflection journals, but are there potential benefits to a real-time, networked "group journal" that would outweigh the potential pitfalls of such a teaching vehicle?

I had no problem with the prospect of disclosing a certain subset of personal information about me to my students through Facebook. Were the students similarly unconcerned with the information about themselves that they were now allowing me to access, which in most cases was of a more intimate nature than what they were receiving from me? Even though there was no element of coercion in this situation, I wondered whether my ready acceptance of these students into this relationship was an example of what the late Kathleen Sullivan called "the hidden ways teachers can coerce disclosure from students," in her seminal article, "Self-Disclosure, Separation, and Students: Intimacy in the Clinical Relationship" (subscription required).

After one of my students learned that I was on Facebook and promptly sent me a friend request, I thought nothing of accepting it, and the ones that followed. The only instances in which I had previously declined friend requests were when they came from individuals about whom I had either no specific memory beyond that they co-existed with me at a particular place and time, or only negative memories (such as, for example, my fifth-grade bully, who clearly had moved on even if I had not). As a result of this not-too-rigorous gatekeeping, my friends list included not only friends but a host of in-laws, some of whom have not yet reached the age of majority, as well as a few of my colleagues, and so I was generally circumspect with regards to the tone and content of what I posted on my Facebook profile. I was not, therefore, too concerned that I would undercut my teaching authority by granting my students the ability to read my "25 Random Things" list, or my extemporaneous musings on the joys and sorrows of being a Duke basketball fan.

However, personal disclosure is a two-way street, and inextricably part of the clinical supervision model, which "forces students and teacher into close, often intense interaction under stressful conditions," as Professor Sullivan described it. Her article was written a decade before the launch of Facebook, but her admission that, "as a young clinical teacher, I think I was often guilty of overidentification with my students (i.e., too much intimacy)," spoke directly to the concerns I began to develop in the months after accepting my students onto my friends list.

For those of you not educated in the ways of Facebook (and if you are interested in learning, Minna has already provided a useful link for this purpose), one of the consequences of accepting someone as your friend on that site is that you are thereafter privy to a constant stream of personal disclosures from that individual that may range from the picayune (I am happy because we bought a new car!) to the profound (I am sad because my loved one has a severe illness). You are also permitted access to the entirety of their profiles, and in many cases to portions of their friends' as well. All of this is limited only by the extent of their use of the site and their individualized security settings.

Although I am not the type of Facebook user who wanders through the profiles of my friends, I early on decided that I would not go to my students' profiles, or directly communicate with them on the site. They, on the other hand, had no problem commenting on my status updates, or on the article links I routinely posted to my profile, either via the "comments" function on the site, or in person to me. I made a lame attempt to establish a firewall by resolving not to cite to or utilize information I gleaned about their lives from Facebook in our personal interactions. The lameness of establishing such an artifical barrier was illustrated to me after I asked one student, without thinking, what car she had bought, after seeing that she had done so in her most recent status update. After this, I gave up on my firewall, and did not hesitate to continue a conversation about Slumdog Millionaire with one student that began after he commented on my posting of what I thought was an unfair criticism of the movie on my profile.

Through all of this, I felt vaguely uneasy about being granted more of a window into the students' selves than is normally accorded through case supervision and seminar discussions, even given the heightened emotions that naturally flowed from the extreme circumstances of our cases, and the many hours of time we spent together, flying around the country for depositions, or driving two hours each way to meet with our fully-shackled clients behind a pane of glass, in a sealed and monitored room.

I reached a decisional point with one of these students when she dropped out of the clinic at the mid-year mark for personal reasons. I had not been privy to the circumstances in her life that had led her to this point, but after her departure I continued to see her status updates and the pictures that would be posted of her by others. All of this information now came to me in a new light. I no longer felt I had any "right" (if that is the appropriate word) to be privy to this information, and I removed her from my friends list, an act that Facebook in its infinite wisdom does not notify anyone else of when it is done. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern that such an event has occurred, as another student in the clinic - who was also friends with this departed student - quickly did. I struggled with whether the student would, upon learning that I had "defriended" her, take this as an act of rejection or disapproval from me. I would never have been put in the position of determining whether or not to communicate such a misleading message, had I not accepted any of my students' friend requests to begin with. Was there a better way?

January 23, 2009

Parenting, Gender, and the Law is a symposium sponsored by the
Stanford Journal for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, with support
from the Clayman Institute, Stanford University Feminist Studies
Department, Graduate Student Council at Stanford University, and
Stanford Law School. The symposium will provide a forum for academics,
legal practitioners, and community organizers and activists to share
ground-breaking work on a number of urgent parenthood-related civil
rights issues. The Symposium will be open to Stanford students,
faculty, and the community at large.

Cherrie Moraga, writer, poet, and playwright, and Artist-in-Resident at Stanford University, will give the Opening Address.

Dorothy Roberts, Kirkland and Ellis Professor at Northwestern University Law School, will give the Keynote Address.

Panel topics include: New Reproductive Technologies and the Law,
Parenting and the Criminal Justice System, Parenting and Labor, and
LGBT parenting. Each panel will discuss issues of gender, state views
of parenthood, and the legal rights of parents. Panel descriptions are here. The agenda can be viewed here.

December 29, 2008

Sometimes
my feelings are so hot that I have to take to the pen and pour them out on
paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and paper
are wasted, because I can’t print the result. I have just finished an
article of this kind, and it satisfies me entirely. It does my
weather-beaten soul good to read it, and admire the trouble it would make for
me and the family. I will leave it behind, and utter it from the
grave. There is free speech there, and no harm to the family.

ABSTRACT:
ANNALS OF DEMOCRACY about exercising free speech from the grave. Its
occupant has one privilege which is not exercised by any living person:
free speech. The living man is not really without this
privilege-strictly speaking-but as he possess it merely as an empty
formality, and knows better than to make use of it, it cannot be
seriously regarded as an actual possession. As an active privilege, it
ranks with the privilege of committing murder: we may exercise it if we
are willing to take the consequences. There is not one individual who
is not the possessor of dear and cherished unpopular convictions which
common wisdom forbids him to utter. When an entirely new and untried
political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled,
anxious, timid, and for a time they are mute, reserved, noncommittal.
Free speech is the privilege of the dead, the monopoly of the dead.
They can speak their honest minds without offending. We may disapprove
of what they say, but we do not insult them, we do not revile them, as
knowing they cannot now defend themselves. If they should speak, it
would be found that in matters of opinion no departed person was
exactly what he had passed for in life. They would realize, deep down,
that they, and whole nations along with them, are not really what they
seem to be-and never can be.

November 25, 2008

The fearless head of our Blog Pride is abandoning us for parts far and wide (more specifically to Manila "with detours to Hanoi and Bangkok"), and has said she will not be blogging regularly between 12/2 and 12/17. (Yeah right. Let's see how long she can stay away. But okay, Stacy and I are humoring her by pretending to be worried, just so she knows how desperately we need her, and how very likley it is the whole thing will fall apart in her absence. )

So, how about some of you folks stepping up to the plate and doing a couple of blog posts? Of course I don't know how to set you up as official guest bloggers (our queen is a bit of a control freak too -- shocking, isn't it?) , but you could email me your posts every now and then and I could post them, giving you full credit, of course.

It would be particularly wonderful to get pictures and travel tidbits sent from parts far and wide in the form of regular GAJE conference bulletins (if only just to show her that it is possible to travel across the world and blog at the same time), but really, anything will do. We're desperate, remember?

November 24, 2008

Last spring I gave a talk on balancing work and family to a class of M.B.A.
students at my university. In the discussion afterward, a young woman
volunteered, "I'm planning to freeze my eggs — it's very expensive and the
procedure I hear is painful, but I don't see how I can plan a family until my
career is going well."

Another student objected, "You don't know if it will work at all. The
technology is still sketchy."

Yet another chimed in, "I waited until I was 35 to have kids. I thought I was
young, but it was too late. It took five years to adopt."

This freezing procedure is experimental, costly, and fraught with medical
pitfalls. In October 2007 the Practice Committee of the American Society for
Reproductive Medicine released an opinion saying that "oocyte cryopreservation,
or egg freezing, ... should not be offered or marketed as a means to defer
reproductive aging." Many questions remain about the procedure, including the
healthy development of babies born from such eggs.

Still, not one of the young people in the audience — mostly women with an
average age of 31 — thought it was a bad idea. To them, it is just the way
things are. If you start a new job after earning your M.B.A., you have to give
it your all to prove you have the "right stuff." Giving your all means working
60 hours a week and traveling a lot. That is the deal.

The men in the class said nothing; they didn't have to. According to the 2000
census, the more hours that professional men work — up to 59 hours a week — the
more children they are likely to have. But for professional women, the opposite
is true: The more hours they work, the fewer children they are likely to
have.

That same census offers an even more brutal assessment of the likelihood that
academic women will have children. Among the professions charted by the census —
faculty members, physicians, lawyers, and CEO's, between the ages of 35 and 50 —
women in academe, no matter how many hours they worked, reported fewer children
than women in all other professional fields.

Among female faculty members who worked between 50 and 59 hours a week, 41
percent reported children in the household, compared with a robust 67 percent
for female doctors.

It is easy to understand why women who work long hours are less likely to
have children, but what about men? Why does their fertility increase with
the number of hours they work?

September 25, 2008

The past week was one of great turbulence, and nobody can predict how the near future will unfold in financial markets. I am writing to reassure you that TIAA-CREF is on a solid footing. I also want to help you answer some questions that may be on your mind. Therefore I urge you to read this message.

We're Here to HelpGiven recent market developments, you may have questions about your retirement savings and other investments. If so, I encourage you to call today to speak with a TIAA-CREF consultant. Our consultants can offer you personalized objective advice, review your current allocations, answer your questions, and help you make sure that your financial plan aligns with your needs and goals.

Sporting an Obama or McCain button? Driving a car with one of the campaigns’ bumper stickers? You might need to be careful on University of Illinois campuses.

The university system’s ethics office sent a notice to all employees, including faculty members, telling them that they could not wear political buttons on campus or feature bumper stickers on cars parked in campus lots unless the messages on those buttons and stickers were strictly nonpartisan. In addition, professors were told that they could not attend political rallies on campuses if those rallies express support for a candidate or political party.

Faculty leaders were stunned by the directives. Some wrote to the ethics office to ask if the message was intended to apply to professors; they were told that it was. At Illinois campuses, as elsewhere, many professors do demonstrate their political convictions on buttons, bumper stickers and the like.

September 24, 2008

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gramm, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We can not directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may speedily transfer your commision for this transaction. After I receive that information I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

September 22, 2008

If conservatives and liberals can't see eye to eye, it may be because their brains are wired differently from birth, according to researchers who have for the first time found a link between people's political leanings and their physiology.

The researchers' report, published in today's issue of the journal Science, suggests that genetic differences may help explain why some people favor capital punishment and the Iraq War, while others support gun control and foreign aid. It's part of a growing field, called "genopolitics," that is threatening to rewrite the rules of political science, which hold that political beliefs are shaped by people's environment and experiences. To work in the new field, political scientists are scrambling to learn genetics, neuroscience, and other aspects of biology.

"We're not arguing that biology is in any sense the whole story," said John R. Alford, an associate professor of political science at Rice University who was involved in the study. "We're just arguing that biology is a piece of the story and it's a completely ignored piece of the story."

The work, however, has triggered an academic debate just as fierce as Congressional arguments over immigration policy. Evan Charney, an assistant professor of political science at Duke University, who heard about the study before it was published, fired off a letter to Science criticizing the research even before it had hit the streets.

September 19, 2008

35% of Professionals Would Choose BlackBerry Over Spouse; Take Our Poll

Posted Sep 17, 2008, 09:58 am CDT

By Debra Cassens Weiss

Professionals have a love-hate relationship with their BlackBerrys, and in some cases it’s interfering with their marriages.

Thirty-five percent of 6,500 professionals surveyed said they would pick their personal digital assistants over their spouses, if they had to choose, and 87 percent said they take their PDAs into their bedrooms, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

Would you rank Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison Blues so low? And where is his I Walk The Line? Details with links to lyrics and YouTube videos at Above the Law. Check out the explanation for Nixon Peabody's We're All Winners. The video for the song was pulled by YouTube.

September 10, 2008

The pooping occurred at approximately 6 a.m. after the 2-year-old leaped into bed and suggested that he'd be most grateful if I got up, escorted him downstairs and turned on his favorite program, a quasi-educational cartoon about a bilingual girl and her pet monkey.

What he actually said was this: "Daddy, up! Dora show! Dora show now!"

Enjoy this story?

Thanks for your support.

On most days, "Dora the Explorer" is good for a solid half-hour of pre-breakfast calm. But not today. Today Oscar motioned to his midsection and said he "hurt."

Woefully misunderstanding the situation, I kissed him on the head and loosened his diaper. At which point he tore off the nappy and grabbed hold of my leg.

And then he pooped on my foot.

This may or may not have been an accident. Looking up at me in the messy slow-motion moments that followed, his expression could only be described as satisfied.

September 03, 2008

Question: The sink in the common kitchen of my department always has dirty dishes, usually mugs, despite the polite sign encouraging people to wash their dishes. My biggest beef about this is that faculty members clearly assume that someone else will clean up, and the office-staff members are left looking at the mess every day.

Dish washing isn't part of the custodians' job. I'm convinced that it's an arrogance of gender and/or social class to assume that someone else will clean up after you.

So the other day, when the mess was particularly disgusting, I threw four mugs, two spoons, and a knife in the trash, and left a note signed, "The Dish Avenger."

I told two people. One, eco-minded, was bothered by the waste, while the other wondered about throwing out other people's property. (I doubt that anyone has a sense of ownership about these communal dishes.)

Did I do wrong? Should I continue?

..........................

Question: I dread "How was your summer?" and all the phony cheer that
accompanies the reopening of school. I'd like to tell the truth about
my rash and my philandering ex and my deadbeat plagiarizing
collaborator, but am I better off saying "Fine" and claiming that I
went to the seashore and loved it because nature is such a beautiful
and healing balm?

August 31, 2008

The energy shift here is very interesting. The Twin Cities population is generally quite progressive, and it feels very much like we are being invaded. At the Crop Art exhibit at the MN State Fair (which really deserves a post all its own), representations of elephants pooping on innocent bystanders abounded. And yesterday, as I drove my daughter home through downtown, we passed a ridiculous stretch hummer limo, driven by an African-American man with long dred locks. Stopped at a light, we all exchanged nods (this is the Midwest, after all), and I called out, "got any Republicans back there?" He replied, "I don't even want to see any!!"

What can we do about the threats to our civil liberties, which, as the posts above and below this one show, emanate not only from the invaders, but from our very own beat cops? We can continue to watch closely from the ground, we can gather any and all to march on the State House on Monday, we can offer our legal services where they are needed, and make phone calls to the St. Paul and Minneapolis government offices. We can, in short, remind those who might imagine they can act with impunity to silence protest, that, yes, the whole world is watching.

August 30, 2008

I really don’t know how much if any
of the message below to believe . . . Professors Patten and Mattson do
appear to be whom they purport to be, academic blogistas, and the blog at http://iwitnessvideo.info/carries the same message as below. I’ve seen nothing on the BBC,
Times,

Washington

Post, or NPR Websites. I did call the phone number listed below and
(after a long wait) it does indeed reach the St. Paul Mayor’s office (or so it
seems – who and what can we trust, these days), so I left a message of concern
that law enforcement may be acting in violation of the First Amendment and
calling on the Mayor to specifically instruct his Police or Public Safety Commissioner
to be sure that during the week to come, all are protected from the risk of
police lawlessness and perjury, and that it is made clear that there is zero
tolerance for any interference with the First Amendment rights of observers and
recorders of public spaces and public employees.

And now I pass this message along
advisedly to some folks whom I believe will, if you’re persuaded this is real,
want to take similar action.

I do know that the entity known as
i-witness video did a magnificent and heroic job of filming police violence,
perjury, and lawlessness at the RNC in New York 2004, where I was a legal
observer, and that only because of i-witness video, many peaceful and lawful
protesters were spared false convictions.

i'm forwarding you this emergency email from Eileen. i just
happened to NOT be at the house when the police showed up, but quite a
few of the i-witness people (and a few friends) are inside the house with her.
they've all been under house arrest for several hours.

please contact the mayor of <

St. Paul

(information at the bottom of Eileen's email) if you have a minute. and keep
your ears posted! (check out http://iwitnessvideo.info/
for ongoing reports -- if, that is, we have time to post them.) there's lots of
other ridiculous shit happening out here, and we'll be posting updates as they
come.

love and thanks.
rachel
------------

This is Eileen Clancy, one of the founders of I-Witness
Video, a NYC-basedvideo collective that's in St. Paul to document the
policing of the protests aroundthis week's
Republican National Convention.The house where I-Witness Video is staying in St. Paul has been surroundedby police. We have locked all the doors. We have
been told that if we leave we will be detained. One of our people who was caught outside isbeing detained in handcuffs in front of the house.
The police say that they are waiting to get a search warrant. More than a dozen police arewielding firearms, including one St. Paul officer with a long gun, which someone told me is an M-16.

We are suffering a preemptive video arrest. For those that don't know,I-Witness Video was remarkably successful in
exposing police misconduct and outright perjury by police during the 2004 RNC. Out of 1800 arrests,at least 400 were overturned based solely on video
evidence which contradicted sworn statements which were fabricated by police officers.It seems that the house arrest we are now
under and the possible threat of the seizure of our computers and video cameras is a result of the 2004success.

We are asking the public to contact the office of St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman
at 651-266-8510 tostop this house arrest,
this gross intimidation by police officers, and thedetention
of media activists and reporters.

August 18, 2008

Last month, back when it was still really summer, I sent a query to the clinic listserv asking what folks who represent clients in contexts other than litigation call those, um, things. Are they called cases?

Here's what I found: business and tax and other traditional transactional clinics universally reject the term "case" for their client work. They use the terms "file" or "matter" or something else, but not case. Clinics that do a hybrid practice (or whose supervisors come from a litigation background) tend to use the term "case" for all their client work, though some do differentiate between the litigation "cases" and the non-litigation "other things."

What I didn't find to my satisfaction was an explanation of why we (or at least some of us) make these distinctions. Why isn't a non-litigation thing-y a "case?" I heard a smattering of thoughts on the subject:

1.Time: "cases" tend to be shorter and more confined in time and space. Huh. That hasn't been my experience. Don't any of you have "clients with tenure" whose, yes, cases drag on and on and on over many years and file cabinets?

2.Subject Matter: "cases" tend to focus on the litigation itself as the driving force that defines its shape and contours. Well, not if the students are being good and client-centered and paying attention to context and collaboration with the client. In such a representation, the "case" would be full of stuff that never makes it anywhere near the litigation strategy.

And what does this mean for our term, "case theory?" Do community development and business law and tax clinics not teach that concept? Or do they teach it in some way but call it something else?

August 13, 2008

WELL, THE ARTICLE IS CLOSE TO FINISHED (MORE ABOUT THAT IN A LATER POST), AND MY SON SAM LEFT FOR THREE WEEKS IN INDIA BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS (WHAT A LIFE!). NOW ALL I HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT IS -- REMEMBER LETTERS FROM CAMP? HERE'S A SELECTION FROM THE COLLEGE VERSION- (you can fill in the blanks for my responses)

Hi mom! Delhi is incredible. My hotel is down this alley and up these marbles
stairs where you cant tell if your inside or outside. turns out most of the
hotel is outside. of course its confusing and what not but the city is
beautiful. all alleys and cows. Im going tomorrow morning to Corbett National
Park to ride an elephant, then back to dehli, to jaipur and then agra, back to delhi and from delhi to goa. the whole thing costs about 22000 rs, or 500
dollars which i need to pay tomorrow morning. including transportation
and hotels up until goa, at which point i need to supply my own lodging. I
arranged this at a government tourist office it seemed. I was skeptical so but
it seems very legit. They arranged a cab to drive me all around dehli until 10
PM for 500 rs. This message is somewaht urgent because in about 22 hours i will
need to have 20500 rs in my hand. there is about 8000 rs in my bank acount.
If this doesnt sound legitimate to you (i wouldnt know) his (rajan's) number
is ... normally i wouldn't want to get you involved but this is all my
funds on the line. Thank you so much for this trip mom, its really
incredible......

no mom a trip from dehli to corbett back to dehli to jaipur to agra to dehli to
goa for 20000 rs. including hotel. it sounds good to me. it certain is govt
organization. i just paid 500 rs to be driven everwhere. these people are
legit. broken keboard makes for short message. please send the 12000
rs for within 18 hours. want to get out of dehli. sorr for curt message,
keboard is broken.

yes I found out how right you are. im getting of this ... town......

ok but i need some amount of money to get out of this city i have 3500. can you find out how much it would cost me to get to ladakh or srinagar? i spent to much in dehli on rickshaw rides, gifts and food and beggars as i did
not know cheap this place was supposed to be. now i know this place is
infinitely cheap. the rest of the money should last me for the rest of the
trip. I'm having a great time and actually having to be responsible for the sake of
survival rather than discipline. its much easier this way......

got the heck out of dehli, the wild east, and made my way by 13 hour bus ride
to Baghsu w/ a nice hippie girl who guided me. where i am now is indescibable.
im in a white hotel for 100 rs a night at the top of this small mountain
surrounded by huge green mountains over looking a town. there are valleys of
mist with mountaintops poking out like islands. the sky is blue long before the
sun rises because of the mountains but in dehli the sone rose dark yellow every
morning. i cant thank you enough for this opprotunity. im going to go now and
try to rent a motorcycle to tour the mountan roads......

dont worry they laughed me out of the hut after an hour of me trying to work
the clutch.maybe in ladehk where i hope to head to next after a brief stint
in masalla.

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August 05, 2008

Recently, we dropped our kids off at camp in New Hampshire. It was a long drive through very beautiful country to much cooler weather than we have been having in NYC. I stopped in a New Hampshire State Liquor Store and was once again impressed by what outstanding retail liquor stores they have up there. I wonder how it came to be that the Live Free or Die state, which eschews taxes and government services, came to have these really well run and apparently lucrative government stores? They are well stocked, well laid out and the prices are quite good. Maybe the big signs and easy access from the highway are a bit much, but I won’t be the one to denigrate an appealing example of good government. So if you are vacationing in New England, spend a little time in NH, save 20% on alcohol and ponder the complexity of our nation.

July 31, 2008

*“I tried to downplay my alpha-maleness by wearing a pink tie so she wouldn’t feel that I was trying to challenge her.” * “I tried to speak in a softer, slightly higher voice, so she wouldn’t get unintentionally turned on by my manly, deep voice.” * “I didn’t comb my hair over my bald spot when I appeared before her so that: 1) she’d feel superior to me, in that she had more hair than I do, and 2) would be repulsed by my baldness and thus not overcome by her lust for me.” * “I pulled out the ol’ earring from college and popped it into my left ear, just so that she could relate better to me.”

July 11, 2008

Yesterday we enjoyed some sun, with the odd spell of rain. The Meteorological Office has a lot of nice expressions for the changeable weather here in London. Last Friday I thanked my summer in Ireland students and said goodbye. My sentimental last words used the old head, hand, heart triplet and I suggested that our three weeks together in Ireland touched principally our hearts - the trickiest of the three for the project of lawyerly formation, I believe, but just as important as the head and hand. I wonder if they appreciate how sincere I am in thanking them? Their willingness to be my students, although flowing mostly from necessity and habit, is real gift. It was only after I taught a while that I began to appreciate how much the students bring. But in our work, except for some colleagues, all things pass in their season. So the students traveled on for more summer classes in Paris, Barcelona or Prague and some went home. I headed to London with my family.

Anyway, you know how some words come to ring in our ears? So I had said, "Let’s take the ferry and train from Dublin to London. It will be fun." Well, the ferry looked great, but I noted that the captain talked about a "fresh wind" and the crew seemed quite busy handing round those little bags to everyone. Although the kids found the rolling ship a hoot, how was I to know my dearest life partner was prone to seasickness? Our kayaking and canoeing never revealed that. And then there was the train journey. If you travel the UK this summer, keep in mind that they are using the weekends for significant trackwork. Suffice it to say there are many, many different ways to get from Holyhead to London. Not all are of equal beauty and not all permit high speed travel.

So my idea of taking the ferry and train rivaled by decision to see Phoenix in July (it can be too hot to go swimming). But the London part of my plan has worked out pretty well. Foreign enough to fascinate, it is also familiar enough for very ready access. I could wax rhapsodic about the place, but what can I add to all that has been said about this great city? And I have been away for almost four weeks and my brain is quite full. Tomorrow we start for home and I look forward to the familiar. Where are you traveling this summer?

July 04, 2008

Summer may not be a time for clinical faculty to decamp to beaches, mountains or lakes (with the exception of all of the lucky folks who have international summer gigs), but it undeniably is a time to slow down a bit. On a beautiful, non-humid day last week, I felt like I was in Amsterdam, Berlin or Copenhagen as I stopped for a red light in the bike lane on Bergen Street in Brooklyn. There were 11 other cyclists, ranging in age and spandex from young and cool (not me) to Mary Poppins (me). The commuting scene is looking different these days, and Brooklyn Law School even added a third bike rack for its cycling population. How green is that!

Slowing down has other benefits, especially in NYC. It's when I can go to an exhibit at the Jewish Museum with Lissa Griffin (Pace), have lunch with law school classmates, former students, and externship supervisors, catch a mid-day movie at the Human Rights Watch film festival with Ursula Bentele (BLS), enjoy opera in Prospect Park, play tennis, do crossword puzzles, have a spa date with Barbara Schatz (Columbia) or talk with Minna Kotkin on Skype while she's on the beach (doing scholarship and blogging, of course). You get the idea.

No matter how busy the summer sometimes has been in the past, and no matter how hard we all work during the school year (clinicians never have not enough to do), summers can and should be treasured as one of the biggest benefits of our jobs (in addition to working with clients, students, and trying to make a difference).

June 25, 2008

Next time you feel a little overwhelmed, grab your Swiffer and give the kitchen floor a quick sweep.

Truth is, you shouldn't dread housework. It actually -- studies bafflingly show -- has the power to cheer you up!

Chores and other forms of medium- to high-intensity activity may lift our emotions in a big way. And it doesn't take much of a time commitment to do the trick. A recent study found that just 20 minutes once a week of any kind of activity -- not just traditional things like walking, but also doing laundry, gardening, or washing windows -- can keep people from feeling anxious, depressed, or overwhelmed. (Learn about the body damage that both big and small stresses can do.)

For extra feel-good measure, try 20 minutes daily, not just weekly. That amount of physical activity improves well-being even more -- in both men and women. (And check out these tips for turning everyday chores into a health-enhancing habit.)

RealAge Benefit: Taking care of your emotional health and well-being can make your RealAge up to 16 years younger.

gbls.gifAfter the Boston Celtics emerged victorious in their match-up with the L.A. Lakers, Bostonites were thrilled. They had that kind of mad happiness that can veer off into loss of reason, then violence. Unfortunately, when the madness took over, a crowd of Celtic fans was in front of the offices of Greater Boston Legal Services.

From the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly's news blog, The Docket:

Two days after the Boston Celtics grabbed the NBA championship for the first time in decades, and as jubilant fans were toasting the team at a victory parade, Robert A. Sable was walking on broken glass in the ruined offices of Greater Boston Legal Services.

GBLS' offices, which are off Causeway Street near the TD Banknorth Garden, bore the brunt of one fan's exuberance after the championship win. Now its newly renovated lobby is destroyed.

June 16, 2008

As I prepare to take off to the East Coast for a month -- guilty mixture of work and play with lots of family thrown in -- I find myself fretting a bit over leaving my lovely house in Minneapolis for that long. What if there are thunder storms and tornadoes (which there will be, this being Minnesota)? What if there is a drought (which there will be, this being Minnesota)? What if the temperature soars above 100 degrees for days on end (which it will, this being Minnesota)? What if there is an unusually late frost (which there will be, this being Minnesota)? I would really like to have someone living here to keep things under control.

And then it hit me: this blog can act as a housing exchange service. I'm sure there are profs out there, say in Hawaii, or Florida, or Telluride, who are just dying to come to Minneapolis in June and July, and who themselves will be travelling extensively in February, and are therefore desperate for someone to take care of their houses and gardens then.

So: calling all clinicians who travel. Send us your plans for the next year, and we blogistas, yentas to the core, will hook you up.

In a previous Academic Life issue, we asked several scholars to share their guilty pleasures, which included casinos, Yoga Toes, and Lost. Many readers have since shared their own indulgences on an online Chronicle forum. Here's a sampling.

A case of Coors Light and a drive down the riverbed, mud-bogging — and a stop at the recycling center on the way home.______________________

Faking citations, ignoring my Step-RiteBingeing and purging broadcast from my Web siteOuting my postdoc as someone who swingsThese are a few of my favorite things.

Ditching a conference to drink with a minorPoison-tipped arrows I'll fire at a ShrinerUndergrads — they're all just fodder for flingsThese are a few of my favorite things._______________________

One of mine would be reading People magazine from cover to cover. I only do this when no one else is looking. Another is watching this new show on the TLC network called Big Medicine, which follows the stories of large people getting gastric bypasses._______________________

I maintain a blog that would be of interest to only a few dozen people in the world, but none of them read it._______________________

I drink beer while grading papers. It's the only way I can get through them. The trick is to pace myself, because at a certain point I can no longer function._______________________

Jimmy Buffett music. Deer hunting (sorry if you don't like it, but they taste great). Searching for thematic humor on the Internet (academic humor, etc.). Reading maps (cheaper than actually taking a trip). Harry Potter (books and movies). Trivia (did you know Beethoven left several shirts at the laundry when he moved?).______________________

Hilary Duff movies. Not the newer ones, but the older ones like A Cinderella Story. I have a 12-year-old daughter, and when she was younger she watched Duff's movies and I would watch them with her. No, I am not a pedophile, but when Hilary Duff was a teenager she had the most luminous and mobile face. I know she's not a great actress and the movies aren't very good unless you're a preteen girl, but I just loved to watch her face. I am prepared for whatever thrashing you all want to send my way. I also enjoy other movies aimed at tweens: Freaky Friday, The Lizzie McGuire Movie, Ice Princess, Princess Diaries, you get the idea._______________________

Vodka, Ho Hos (sooo much better than Yodels), Keno, pretty much any bad reality television or real-estate program, cheesy "casual dining" restaurants like Chili's and Applebees, prokraz-tinating as an art form perfected in the era of the Internet._______________________

Cheesy historical fiction novels. I'm in a historical field, so I'm supposed to know better and not enjoy romanticized and not-very-accurate versions of history — but I know the difference between scholarship and fluff, and it's fun.

Also, cupcakes. Lots of cupcakes.________________________

Comic books. I love 'em! On Thursdays, before I come to my office, I stop by the comic store and then bring them to work. I shut my office door and greedily read before I do any work. Chuckle._________________________

Barry Manilow (he's on tour!) and The Simpsons._________________________

I nearly wrote that my guilty pleasure is kicking on my Rat distortion pedal when I play my guitar, but I don't feel guilty about the nasty tone and increased volume. It might be an offensive sound to some people, but I don't care. I don't do it to offend people, contrary to the image of rock 'n' roll and jazz as transgressive, profane art forms. I do it out of an artistic impulse, and if some people like it and others don't then that's the way of the world.________________________

The Chicago Cubs! Although, to be honest, "pleasure" is not always the right word.

June 06, 2008

This morning I ran 20 miles in preparation for a marathon. This will be
my 15th marathon since I started running in my 30s, and I'm still
loping along in my late 50s. My best time was close to three hours,
which I set in my younger days, but now I'm expecting to do something
closer to four. In fact, a Web site that predicts finishing times based
on past performance showed me finishing this year in three hours, 48
minutes — exactly my time when I ran last year.

It's expected
that athletes will slowly decline in ability as they age. Every athlete
accepts that. But not every professor does. It seems more or less
forbidden to talk about what happens to academics as they age. There is
virtual silence about the kind of age-associated changes that affect
teaching, learning, and research. Baby boomers, known for their
willingness to talk about everything having to do with themselves, have
been open on issues from breast cancer to erectile dysfunction,
empty-nest syndrome, and depression — but in academe, no one dares
utter the word "old." Is this because we think that the intellect is
ageless, and in an era of Botox and Viagra, there should be no excuse
for the vagaries of time? Or are we just worried about keeping our jobs?

But
my age cohort faces definite challenges that need talking about. I've
asked around a bit, and here are some of the issues that have come up.The biggest is memory. Everyone over 50 knows about age-associated memory loss. That loss tends to be in specific areas, although studies have shown that overall memory doesn't necessarily deteriorate with age. The loss that affects academics most is the dreaded unavailability of proper names.

I used to pride myself on my ability to produce instantly the author and title of a book, and even the publisher and date of publication. That's an invaluable skill in lectures, advising sessions, and symposia. Now I find that it takes me a little longer — well, sometimes a lot longer — to recall the name of a book or an author, and you can forget about the publisher and date. I've developed stalling tactics to deal with the memory hiccup, allowing the gremlins in my brain time to riffle through the cerebral archive. I've even suggested to students and colleagues that instead of causing them annoying moments waiting around for me to retrieve information, I will simply say "proper name" as a place holder. You know, when you talk about that book by Proper Name published by Proper Name Press, and made into the movie starring Proper Name?

Then of course there is the absence of short-term memory in recalling recent events. In real life, that translates into the senior moment of going into another room to get something, only to stand in confusion trying to remember what that thing was. In academic life, it becomes an occasion to repeat a piece of information to a class, having forgotten whether one mentioned it in a previous session. It's easy to work around that kind of memory loss by asking students, "Did we discuss this point?" However, if you ask the question too often, you risk being considered doddering.

Perhaps a bit more disturbing was the experience of a colleague who read an article on ancient Greek drama with great excitement, took extensive notes, and determined to use the material in an article — only to discover when going through previous notes that he had read the entire article the year before and had already taken extensive notes.

Then there is the zeitgeist issue — you no longer live in the same world as your students do. You refer to things that seem to have happened fairly recently — John F. Kennedy's assassination, the Beatles, TV shows like The Honeymooners and Leave It to Beaver (or you just use "Eddie Haskell" as a shortcut for a "toady," itself a word no longer used) — only to realize that your students not only don't understand these casual references but weren't even born when these things were around. Maybe, in an effort to be "hip," you start mining your children and grandchildren for current phrases. If you're lucky, you can pull this off, but more likely you'll get it wrong and think "hipsters" are the same as "hippies," or that "emo" is a character on Sesame Street. Handled badly, this attempt to be in the know can make you look like your elderly Aunt Selma doing the twist at some family affair (although your students probably don't even know what the twist is).

That brings up the issue of hipness in general. When I began teaching, I wanted to be the hip, cool professor who, like some of the professors I had had, seemed to have just arrived from some great party or literary event. I had an art-history professor when I was an undergraduate who showed up at a 9 a.m. class wearing a Persian-lamb trench coat and a Humphrey Bogart hat. He always looked as if he had stayed up all night, and he smelled of cigarette smoke, perfume, and booze. A few years later, he was a resident of a nursing home in the neighborhood of the university, sitting outside on sunny days and looking smaller and thinner than he had in class — certainly without his panache. As I get older, I wonder if my panache is leaving me, and if my sartorial statements are embarrassing me without my knowing it. (Does a student think, when she looks at my corduroy blazer, "He is so 90s"?)

Worse, everyone of a certain age worries that they've run out of ideas. When I was a young professor, back in the late 70s, I attended a lecture by the French structuralist critic Roland Barthes. In his 60s at the time, during a talk unashamedly called "Proust et moi," he wondered aloud where his own career was going and said that most people had only one good idea in their lives, two if they were lucky. It never occurred to me before that moment that people like Barthes were anything but endlessly creative. Now in my 50s, I wonder the same thing. I've been lucky enough to find and be excited by a series of new interests and ideas, having moved from the theory of the novel to disability studies to biocultures in a way that has felt continuous and yet fresh. But what if I am just dressing up some central insight in different disguises, reconstructing it for each of my books?

For many academics, the so-called golden years can be leaden days spent shuffling around old ideas and notes, feeling the depression of sameness and routine mounting and pointing like the exterminating angel toward the exit door of retirement. Add to that problems like difficulty in focusing one's attention and declining sight and hearing, and you've got some serious challenges to teaching and research.

That exit door does start to loom larger and larger in one's consciousness as one ages. In Europe there are mandatory retirement ages, but not in the United States. We can teach till we or our students drop — but should we? How will I know when it's time for me to quit? I know one professor in his 90s who still teaches a course or two a year and edits a journal. But for every one of him, there are a lot of other folks who cut back on hours spent on research and class preparation, relying on their yellowed notecards, and increase their time at the golf course or gym.

Being an aging academic has a definite upside, though. You know more; you've read more; you've seen intellectual fads come and go. "Ripeness is all," King Lear said, and that ripeness gives flavor and color to our work and our teaching. We may not be young, hip professors anymore, but Academic Central Casting has plenty of room for the wise woman and the knowing don. A lifetime of experience, reading, and writing is a valuable resource. When I turned 50, I decided that it was time to start giving back, and I made a commitment to be a mentor to junior faculty members and graduate students. Perhaps we can take advantage of the physical and mental aspects of aging by using them to benefit others.

Still, it's not so easy to dismiss the cares of older age with a quick bit of folksy wisdom or inspiring thoughts at the end of an essay. Age is for real, and so is death. Even if age and death don't get you just now, simply being of a certain age will. I'm hearing more and more scholars, especially women, say that they aren't revealing how old they are anymore. Although we all abhor age discrimination, it is one form of prejudice that flies low on the outrage radar. You might look great, run marathons, even use Botox, but you could still be the victim of discrimination. So while personal self-help is useful, it's even more important for our institutions to take special care that fairness and justice apply to everyone in academe — especially those who have served it throughout a lifetime.

Lennard J. Davis is a professor of English, disability and human development, and medical education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is author, most recently, of Obsession: A History, to be published this fall by the University of Chicago Press.http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 39, Page B22

May 27, 2008

As I settle back in to life in a city with not even one Saguaro, thoughts turn to my summer projects – cleaning my office, planning my new Legal Planning Clinic, and, of course: writing. And, being a clinician, my writing involves a lot of going through old client files and looking for juicy stories to tell.

Yes, I admit it: I use my clients’ stories to further my scholarship. But we all do it, don’t we? It’s the bread and butter, nay the meat, of clinical scholarship. And yet it does cause a twinge every now and then. Indeed recently, there was a query to the listserv asking these very questions: should we do it? Do we have to do it? Are there ways to do it that satisfy both the ethical concerns we might have for our clients’ privacy and autonomy, and our desire to enrich ourselves and the body of clinical scholarship?

Others wiser (or at least older) than I have pondered these questions and here’s a smattering of what they’ve come up with:

Ann Juergens, Teach Your Students Well: Valuing Clients in the Law School Clinic, 2 Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 339 (1993) (you shouldn’t).

Nina Tarr, Clients' and Students' Stories: Avoiding Exploitation and Complying with the Law to Produce Scholarship with Integrity, 5 Clinical Law Review 271 (1998) (maybe if you’re careful).

Steve Johansen, This is Not the Whole Truth: The Ethics of Telling Stories to Clients, 38 Arizona State L.J. 961 (2006) (all storytelling is deception anyway)

Martha Montello, Confessions and Transgressions: Ethics and Life Writing, Hastings Center Report p. 46 (March-April 2006) (who are we kidding? Writers have been doing this forever – Dickens and Fitzgerald, just off the top of my head.)

COURTESY OF THE FEMINIST LAW PROFESSORS BLOG:

“Ohio Northern University awards bachelor’s degree to canine”

A well-trained golden retriever will receive a
bachelor’s degree from Ohio Northern University today along with the
rest of the graduating class. Zeeke, a 1-year-old dog, will earn his
bachelor’s of science degree in canine companionship. The canine has
spent thousands of hours training as a Canine Companion dog as part of
a senior’s honors project.

ONU President Kendall Baker said he believes this is the first time the university has ever awarded a diploma to an animal.

Zeeke has learned to pull a wheelchair, open doors and retrieve fallen objects.

Canine Companions for Independence places service dogs with people in need for free.

And the first commenter says:

I don’t think anyone should be able to get a Bachelor’s
degree in one year, even if it works out to seven “dog years.” Was the
dog unwilling to accept an AA degree instead?

Hey, at least the dog completed some coursework, and is likely to make positive contributions to society. Unlike Phyllis Schlafly, as Brian Leiter explains here
in some detail. Shorter Leiter: There is a difference between giving a
wrongheaded bigot the opportunity to speak, and awarding her an
honorary degree; it’s okay to do the first, but not the second.

May 24, 2008

I wanted to ask you to consider adding your name to a
petition, www.humanrightsintibet.com,
on behalf of Tibetans seeking meaningful dialogue with China. We intend to present the petition to the
international community very soon and wanted to collect as many signatures as
possible from the legal and non-legal community. Please send the petition to friends, family
and other colleagues who might be interested, too. Many thanks and best wishes for a healthy,
happy and productive summer.

Well, it turns out people really care about this. Not that you would know it from comments posted on this site, but on the more private clinic list serv, I received close to 20 responses to my "What's in a Name?" query within two hours of posting it. Here are some of my favorite emails (unattributed to protect the senders' privacy):

"Oh, good Lord. Doesn’t anyone appreciate sarcasm anymore? My six year old does. She’s a great eye roller, too."

"We know that we have arrived when we can make light of ourselves, without concern that others take our work lightly"

AND, from the other camp:

"I have never taken to the name. As a charter member of the Club of People Who Take Themselves Seriously, what else would you expect from me?"

From my very unscientific survey, the "keep the name" folks have it. But let's face it, is the group of 20 or so who answered the query really a representative sampling? David Santacroce, where are you when we need you?? But seriously, you guys feel strongly about this question -- I haven't seen the list serv this hot in a while -- and I would really like to know why. What nerve did I hit with this question? (I wish I could ponder this question more, but I don't have time -- too much to do.)

In the meantime, we are not going to change the name because it's a big pain in the tuchus and risks all kinds of destruction, to wit: "links to your weblog will be broken. Additionally, if you have uploaded any images, the paths will be broken and the images will not display." So for now, we're considering changing the subtitle, and are open to suggestions.

Poor Narcissus: He could only gaze into a pool. Today's college
students can watch themselves endlessly on Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube
on their 27-inch, flat-screen LCD monitors.

But does that make them narcissists?

Jean M. Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San
Diego State University, says gadgets and online social-networking sites
have stoked the self-loving tendencies of modern students, known as
"Millennials." On Tuesday, Ms. Twenge unveiled her findings from a new
study that describes this wired and coddled generation as the most
narcissistic in recent history.

The unpublished study is based on the responses of 16,000
college students who completed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory
between 1982 and 2006. The scale measures responses to an array of
statements, including "If I ruled the world, it would be a better
place," and "I can live my life any way I want to."

Ms. Twenge, who conducted the study with four other
researchers, defines narcissism as excessive vanity and sense of
entitlement. The researchers say that people who exhibit such qualities
tend to lack empathy for others, behave aggressively when insulted, and
ignore the needs of those around them.

In their report on the study, the researchers warn that legions
of severely swollen heads could harm American society: "It is possible
to imagine a narcissistic Lake Wobegon," they wrote. "Everyone is
attractive or getting surgery to become so; competition and individual
pursuits trump group or collective action; relationships are
superficial and transient; kids are treated permissively at home and
fed with self-inflating messages at school."